Older subscribers will remember those dear dead Saturday afternoons spent in the record store where a patient assistant would direct them to a listening booth and play all the latest 45s the customer had asked to hear – but today, technology is in control and Laser Video Network Inc, ostensibly based in New York, has joined forces with the Deerfield Beach, Florida New Leaf Entertainment Inc joint venture of IBM Corp and Blockbuster Entertainment Inc to create a system for in-store listening booths that packs 15,000 snippets of album tracks, and images of 3,000 album covers, onto a CD-ROM disk, so that the customer can be left to get on with it without troubling the staff; the system goes into Blockbuster Music Plus stores across the US starting in the fourth quarter.
